Sexual Harassment Poster from the Taipei Subway

Thanks to RiceAgain (Nickdobson.net) for the following photo of a sexual harassment poster that was seen on the Taipei tube.

性騷擾（性骚扰）

Pinyin: xìng sāo rǎoEnglish: sexual harassment

Worth noting is that the woman being harassed is saying “ㄟ” which is the Zhuyin for the Pinyin “ei”, this is just a phonetic and she’s either saying “Hey!” in anger, or “ehhh!” in surprise. Check out our Pinyin/Zhuyin Cheatsheet for more comparison between these phonetic alphabets.

There’s a lot of useful related words that we can learn from this poster. Firstly, the poster reads:

擊退性騷擾（击退性骚扰）
jítuì* xìngsāorǎo
Fight Sexual Harassment

*note: 擊（击）is first tone in China （jī）, and second tone in Taiwan （jí）.

擊退（击退 jítuì） means to “fight off” or to “repel”. 擊（击 jí） is from 攻擊（攻击 gōng jí）to “attack”, and 退 means to move backwards and is also used in the word 退步（tuì bù）which means to “regress” or “do worse than before” and might be used as so:

我上次回英國時我中文退步很多（我上次回英国时我中文退步很多）
wǒ shàngcì huí yīngguó shí wǒ zhōngwén tuìbù hěnduō
The last time I went back to the UK my Chinese regressed a lot.

The 性 in 性騷擾（性骚扰 xìngsāorǎo）here means “sex” or “gender”, and 騷擾（骚扰）means to “harass”. 騷（骚 sāo）is an extremely useful word to learn, it means “trouble” or “disturbance” and when used in the word 騷動（骚动 sāo dòng） can be used to describe societal instability, or more specifically, a riot.